Proteins That Control Life Brings Nobel For India

It's a proud moment for India. UK-based Indian origin scientist Dr. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on proteins that control life .

Short Biography Of Dr.Venkatraman Ramakrishnan :

Dr. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, known to most as "Venki," started out as a theoretical physicist. After graduate school, he designed his own 2-year transition from physics to biology. Then, as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr Peter Moore at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E. coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since.

In the August 26, 2000 issue of Nature, Dr Ramakrishnan and his coworkers published the structure of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus, a heat-stable bacterium related to one found in the Yellowstone hot springs. With this 5.5 Angstrom-resolution structure, Dr. Ramakrishnan's group identified key portions of the RNA and, using previously determined structures, positioned seven of the subunit's proteins.

Dr.Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, 58, had his early education in the town of Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, and Baroda, Gujarat, before went to the US. He later moved to US. The Swedish Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Dr Ramakrishnan, who is currently affiliated with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, for his work on protein-producing ribosomes and its translation of DNA information into life. He shared the prize with Dr Thomas Steitz of Yale University, Connecticut, and Dr Ada Yonath of Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
He credited the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the University of Utah for supporting his work and the collegiate atmosphere there that made it all possible.Surly he made a great contribution.

THE RESEARCH:

The practical importance of Dr Ramakrishnan's work arises from ribosomes being present in allliving cells, including those of bacteria. Human and bacterial ribosomes are slightly different,making the ribosome a good target for antibiotic therapy that works by blocking the bacteriums ability to make the proteins it needs to function.Ramakrishnan, Steitz and Yonath demonstrated what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at an atomic level using a visualization method called X-ray crystallography to map the position of each of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome, according to the MRC.

Dr. Ramakrishnan said:

‘‘I have to say that I am deeply indebted to all of the brilliant associates, students and post docs who worked in my lab as science is a highly collaborative enterprise. The MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the University of Utah supported this work and the collegiate atmosphere there made it all possible. The idea of supporting long term basic research like that at LMB does lead to breakthroughs, the ribosome is already starting to show its medical importance.’’

"There are lots of good scientists in India but I notice the press is hung up about these Western prizes like the Nobel Prize instead of appreciating the excellent work they (scientists) are doing within the context of India. There are lots of good labs in India where they can do excellent work. Well, in 1971 there were only a few places in India - there was not much research and money for research in India at that time."

"I have been to India several times since and these days there are some really fantastic places in India like the Indian Institute of Science and several others...those are very good places and very good scientists," Ramakrishnan, added.

"This year's three Laureates have all generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering," the Nobel citation explained.

Scientists say growing knowledge of the ribosome has created targets for a new generation of antibiotics. The instruction manual for the creation of proteins is DNA, but the ribosome is the machine which takes information transcribed onto messenger RNA and turns it into proteins.

Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Medical Research Council Chief Executive, said:

‘‘We are absolutely delighted that Dr Ramakrishnan’s work has been recognized with the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Venki’s award is the Medical Research Council’s 29th Nobel Prize and is a reflection of the excellent work that our scientists do. The MRC is committed to long-term support of the difficult areas of basic science as exemplified by Venki’s success. It is only on the back of such discoveries that we can continue to drive translation into benefits for human health.’’

Elaborating, the MRC said Dr Ramakrishnan's basic research on the arrangement of atoms in the ribosome has allowed his team not only to gain detailed knowledge of how it contributes to protein production but also to see directly how antibiotics bind to specific pockets in the ribosome structure. Dr Ramakrishnan will share the 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million) Nobel Prize money (1/3rd each), in a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.

This must be the greatest moment for all the Indians who are proud to having such a biggest Personality who discovered a new theory of life origin... This is a small step for science but a giant for Indian glory.


learn more about the secret behind Nobel Prize At HERE

Top 20 Things You Didn't Know About ... Genius !

Top 20 Things You Didn't Know About ... Genius

How do the Nobel Prize winners get so damn smart?

1. The latest winners of the Nobel Prizes -- the big kahuna of genius awards -- will be announced October 5 this year. Were you nominated? To find out, you’ll have to either win or wait 50 years, which is how long the Nobel committee keeps secret the list of also-rans.

2. Nyah, nyah. William Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel in physics for inventing the transistor, was excluded as a child from a long-term study of genius because his IQ score wasn’t high enough.

3. History repeated itself in 1968 when Luis Alvarez won a Nobel for his work on elementary particles. He had been excluded from the same research program as Shockley. Who set up that study, anyway?

4. The genius study was created in 1928 by Louis Terman at Stanford University, who pioneered the use of IQ tests to identify geniuses, defined by him as those with an IQ greater than 140.

5. None of the children (known as “Termites”) in the study has won a Nobel.

6. Still smart, though: Termite Jess Oppenheimer invented the TelePrompTer, and Norris Bradbury headed the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

7. Many 19th- and 20th-century creative geniuses acquired a reputation for promiscuity. Examples include Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell.

8. One theory suggests that male geniuses are unusually endowed with enthusiasm for risk-taking, which is notoriously testosterone-linked.

9. In 1981 Shockley and eugenicist Robert Klark Graham cofounded the Repository for Germinal Choice in Southern California, a sperm bank dedicated to selling the seed of Nobel Prize winners and other men with a high I.Q.

10. Graham died in 1997. The Repository for Germinal Choice closed in 1999.

11. Being a genius is no guarantee of financial security. A recent study at the Ohio State University Center for Human Resource Research showed that baby boomers with average and low IQs were just as good at saving money as those with high IQs.

12. Albert Einstein is said to have lost most of his Nobel money in bad investments. Anyone can do that.

13. Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician, identified what is now called Asperger’s syndrome: a form of autism marked by intense absorption in a very narrow range of special interests.

14. Asperger believed that there is a link between mathematical and scientific genius and his syndrome, claiming that "for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential."

15. Sometimes stereotypes are accurate. Norbert Wiener, who invented the field of cybernetics, was the prototype of the absent-minded genius.

16. Once, Weiner forgot he’d driven to a conference, took the bus home, and then reported his car stolen when he didn’t see it in his driveway.

17. In the 1990s Bell Labs found that its most valued and productive electrical engineers were not those endowed with genius but those who excelled in rapport, empathy, cooperation, persuasion and the ability to build consensus.

18. Too much partying? In 2007 researchers at Kyoto University pitted chimpanzees against college students in three memory-based intelligence tests. The highest-scoring chimp beat all the students in the first test, tied with a few in the second test and reigned again in the third.

19. Try pitting him against the chimp. Alex, a gray parrot who died last September at age 31, has been widely billed as the smartest bird ever. Alex could identify 50 objects, seven colors and shapes and quantities of up to six.

20. You, too, can be a genius (maybe). Scientists at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University in Australia say intelligence can be boosted, at least in the short term, by a daily dose of 5 milligrams of creatine, a compound found in muscle tissue.

Source : 1. encarta.msn.com , 2. Wikipedia.org

A Dinosaur Dance Floor !

Geologist Winston Seiler with some of the dinosaur tracks he identified for his thesis as a University of Utah master's degree student. The impressions once were thought to be potholes eroded by water. But Seiler and Marjorie Chan, chair of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, published a scientific paper in the October 2008 issue of the journal Palaios identifying the abundant impressions as comprising a large dinosaur "trample surface" in northern Arizona. There are so many tracks they wryly refer to the site as "a dinosaur dance floor."

University of Utah geologist Winston Seiler walks among hundreds of dinosaur footprints in a "trample surface" that likely was a watering hole amid desert sand dunes during the Jurassic Period 190 million years ago. The track site, which also includes some dinosaur tail-drag marks, is located in Coyote Buttes North area along the Arizona-Utah border.

This Eubrontes dinosaur footprint, including three toes and a heel, measures roughly 16 inches long. Dinosaur footprints are named by their shape because the species and genus of animal that made them isn't known, although Eubrontes tracks are believed to have been made by upright-walking, meat-eaters smaller than Tyrannosaurus rex. Eubrontes is one of four types of dinosaur footprints identified by University of Utah geologists at a Jurassic Period dinosaur "trample surface" in northern Arizona. The footprints previously had been thought to be modern potholes eroded by water. The inset outlines the footprint shape.

Photo on left shows eroded dinosaur footprints, and tail-drag marks highlighted in the diagram at right, at a northern Arizona site that University of Utah geologists are calling "a dinosaur dance floor."

This 4-inch long Grallator dinosaur track is among four types of dinosaur footprints identified by University of Utah geologists at a large dinosaur "trample surface" in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness near the Arizona-Utah border. They were left by a small dinosaur, perhaps only 3 feet tall, some 190 million years ago.

This photo shows a trackway, or set of prints made by the same dinosaur, as it walked through a wet, sandy oasis some 190 million years ago in what is now the Coyote Buttes North area straddling the Utah-Arizona border. University of Utah geologists published a new study showing that numerous impressions at the site are dinosaur tracks, not erosion-caused potholes as was believed previously.
This 14-inch-long Sauropodomorph dinosaur track actually is two footprints in one and was left by a creature that walked on four legs. The imprint includes the deeper central circular portion, which was left when a dinosaur's "pes" or rear foot, stepped into the larger, shallower print left by a "manus" or front foot. The toe prints, top and upper right, were left by the front foot, obscuring prints from the rear toes. The print is one of many identified by University of Utah scientists at a large dinosaur "trample surface" in the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in northern Arizona.

University of Utah geologist Winston Seiler walks in the path of dinosaurs. The dinosaur tracks were preserved in a "trample surface" where the reptiles likely gathered to drink water at an oasis among arid sand dunes some 190 million years ago. The site is in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness along the Arizona-Utah border.

The "dinosaur dance floor," formally known as a dinosaur "trample surface," is outlined by white dashes in this photo taken from a hill above the three-quarter-acre site. The site's numerous holes in Jurassic sandstone were identified as dinosaur tracks by University of Utah geologists Marjorie Chan and Winston Seiler.

A dinosaur trample surface has been identified on the Arizona side of that state's border with Utah. Geologists from the University of Utah determined the numerous impressions at the site are dinosaur tracks, not erosion features.

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